Wednesday, 1 May 2013

Immigration FOIA requests problem

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) reports that "at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) there has been a rapid rise in the backlog of FOIA requests received that have been waiting unanswered for long periods of time. According to its annual FOIA report, ICE had only 50 pending requests at the end of FY 2011; this number jumped to 2,903 at the end of FY 2012 after the agency was assigned the responsibility of processing some of the backlog of FOIA requests received by the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS). And according to the latest available agency records analyzed by TRAC, ICE's backlog is projected to grow to over 13,125 by the end of September 2013 when the fiscal year ends, three and a half times higher than it was at the end of FY 2012."TRAC derives much of its data from FOIA requests that it files with the federal government.